Laboratory Support for Service Engineering and Design

Author(s):  
Thomas Meiren ◽  
Christian van Husen ◽  
Reuven Karni

Services are frequently developed unsystematically; and new ideas are not sufficiently conceptualized and tested. This results in expensive improvement measures at a later stage during the operations phase. This challenge is addressed through the recent launching of the “ServLab” facility at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering. It incorporates a stage for acting out service scenarios, furnishings to represent the physical environment, and a large virtual reality (VR) backdrop to simulate the “servicescape”. Situations are played out by professional actors or by employees and invited customers. In particular, the ServLab makes it possible to test services comprehensively. It is just this problem which has not been solved satisfactorily for a long time — neither in science nor in practice. It is still common for concepts to be developed “round the green table”, followed by an attempt to implement them directly. Potential mistakes are discovered very late or not at all, resulting in expensive rectification activities. The ServLab makes it possible to visualise new service concepts (using virtual reality), create an environment that is as close as possible to reality (e.g. by playing back sounds or introducing odours) and to rehearse the interaction between customers and employees with the support of actors (service theatre).

Information ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Stavroula Tzima ◽  
Georgios Styliaras ◽  
Athanasios Bassounas

Escape Rooms are presently considered a very popular social entertainment activity, with increasing popularity in education field, since they are considered capable of stimulating the interest of players/students and enhancing learning. The combined game mechanics have led to blended forms of Escape Rooms, the Serious Escape Games (SEGs) and the hybrid type of Escape Rooms that uses Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality technology, a type that is expected to be widely used in the future. In the current study, the MillSecret is presented, a multi-player Serious Escape Game about local cultural heritage, where the players must solve a riddle about the cultural asset of watermills. MillSecret uses AR technology and it was designed to be conducted in the real-physical environment and in an informal educational context. The paper describes the game, its implementation, the playing process, and its evaluation, which aimed to study the feasibility of game conduction in outdoor settings and the views and experience of players with the game, the local cultural heritage and local history. Evaluation results reveal, among other findings, a very positive first feedback from players that allows us to further evolve the development of the game.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Jingfeng Shao ◽  
Zhigang Yang

Automobile styling design is an important part of the design chain. In the traditional automobile modeling evaluation, the process of project evaluation is more in-depth, and designers exchange ideas. Different designers have different evaluations of automobile styling. The evaluation process lasts a long time, which leads to the design cycle being too long and the efficiency of automobile modeling evaluation is greatly reduced. The introduction of virtual reality in automobile modeling evaluation can effectively optimize the evaluation process and promote the rapid adjustment of the model on the basis of development. From the virtual reality system based on mechanical engineering, we only need the parameters of the car model to observe the actual situation through VR technology, and use the measurement tools to directly and accurately evaluate the driver’s field of vision. Through the application of virtual reality technology in the automobile design stage, the interactive and network-based remote research on automobile modeling will also make the automobile design process more convenient, easier to communicate with designers, and reduce the development cycle and cost of automobile design.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (EICS) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Carlos Bermejo ◽  
Lik Hang Lee ◽  
Paul Chojecki ◽  
David Przewozny ◽  
Pan Hui

The continued advancement in user interfaces comes to the era of virtual reality that requires a better understanding of how users will interact with 3D buttons in mid-air. Although virtual reality owns high levels of expressiveness and demonstrates the ability to simulate the daily objects in the physical environment, the most fundamental issue of designing virtual buttons is surprisingly ignored. To this end, this paper presents four variants of virtual buttons, considering two design dimensions of key representations and multi-modal cues (audio, visual, haptic). We conduct two multi-metric assessments to evaluate the four virtual variants and the baselines of physical variants. Our results indicate that the 3D-lookalike buttons help users with more refined and subtle mid-air interactions (i.e. lesser press depth) when haptic cues are available; while the users with 2D-lookalike buttons unintuitively achieve better keystroke performance than the 3D counterparts. We summarize the findings, and accordingly, suggest the design choices of virtual reality buttons among the two proposed design dimensions.


1982 ◽  
Vol 14 (9) ◽  
pp. 1175-1193 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Herz

The question of the extent to which the concrete physical environment allows, causes, or even forces certain forms of behaviour to occur has been excluded from social sciences literature for a long time. More recent studies from environmental psychology show that the built environment, filtered by subjective perceptions, very probably influences the experience and actions of individuals. Town planning and transport planning is orientated towards the needs, demands, or simply the observed behaviour of social groups, segments of the population, and target groups of individuals. However, at this level the evidence about whether a spatiospecific determinant should be added to the sociodemographic, sociocultural, or socioeconomic determinants is very inconclusive. This paper investigates the influence of certain types of area on behaviour, and uses about 70000 weekday records at the level of differentiated groups of people. Everyday behaviour of the groups is quantified by their time budgets and daily programmes with broad groupings of out-of-house activities as well as various indicators of transport mobility. This study shows that with given characteristics of the individual and his household a series of behavioural parameters does not vary in space and thus these parameters can be used as input for behaviourally orientated transport demand models and transferred from one planning area to another.


Georesursy ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 34-39
Author(s):  
Azariy A. Barenbaum

New ideas about the origin of oil and gas are discussed. They are caused by the discovery of the phenomenon of replenishment of oil and gas reserves in exploited fields. This phenomenon was discovered by the Russian geologists a quarter of a century ago, and a little later it was theoretically justified on the basis of the biosphere concept of oil and gas formation. As a result, the well-known «organic hypothesis» and «mineral hypothesis», which have long time competed in oil and gas geology are being replaced by new representations today, according to which oil and gas are the inexhaustible useful fossils of our planet. And their deposits are traps of movable carbon that circulates via the Earth’s surface in three main cycles with periods of ~108-109, ~106 -107 and ≈ 40 years. The 40-year carbon biosphere cycle, which was not previously taken into account at all, plays a main role in replenishment of deposits. Its accounting makes it possible to balance the carbon and water cycles in the biosphere, taking into account the economic activities of people and modern formation of oil and gas in the bowels, and also open up the possibility of exploiting deposits as constantly replenished sources of hydrocarbons.


2019 ◽  
pp. 359-365
Author(s):  
Tetiana Tsymbaliuk-Skopnenko

The term divergence is used traditionally in linguistics in origin of language and dialectology to denote the distinction between certain idioms. However, the unit under consideration was used in a wider context, because it denotes the process and the consequence that are caused by the distinction of features and properties of objects – something that ultimately leads to the division of the previously indistinguishable, and hence the appearance of new ideas about the world. In word formation, divergence is understood as the differentiation of common-root derivatives in terms of content or peculiarities of their use. Researchers also use the notions of semantic divergence – the difference in the content structure of derivative units with certain semantic nuances, which shows their semantic non-identity. Phraseography – conventionally derivative unit of lexemy lexicography, in this case we must talk about creating the first term by model of the second. For a long time in the scientific literature lexicography was used to refer to the section of linguistics, within which, with the help of certain methods, both lexemes and phraseologisms are described, although these units have different nature. The growth of phraseology as a separate scientific field did not automatically lead to the fixing of the term phrazeography in the national scientific discourse. Modern search engines on the Internet provide information that in this network found over a thousand documents in the Ukrainian language, which includes the word phrazeography. Certainly, this cannot be an example of the frequency of the use of this lexeme, but this fact suggests that in the modern scientific world there is a critical mass for understanding of the phrazeography as a separate scientific field. Some important arguments against this tendency were not found, although in modern university textbook phrazeography information is presented in the section “Phraseology” or at the end of “Lexicsology”, while lexicography as a separate branch, not within the limits of lexicology, has long been entrenched in the educational and scientific literature. And it sounds paradoxical to a certain extent, because it is from phraseology (however, in symbiosis with lexicography), not only the newest Ukrainian phraseology as a science began, the description of phraseological units was one of the first tasks of Ukrainian vocabulary in general. In addition, we note that the term “science about dictionaries” is most often used in the sense of “lexicography”. Since the tradition of non-differentiation of lexicography and phraseology is very strong, it would be expedient (and simply convenient) to use this Ukrainian term for the definition of synthetic understanding of the two branches of philology as a related unity: lexicography (theoretical and practical) and phrazeography (also theoretical and practical). If we accept such a proposal, then there will be no unnecessary confrontation between lexicography and phrazeography, the uncertainty of which leads to many misunderstandings. We can conclude that there is no reason to denote by the term lexicography the whole set of scientific approaches related to the phrazeography description. In Ukrainian linguistics, it is necessary to clearly delineate the terms lexicography and phrazeography, since they, over the last time, consolidated various semantic concepts.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Xiaolin Wang ◽  
Ningning Zhang ◽  
Jiakun Yan

With a varied physical environment, plants have developed specific mechanisms that allow them to rapidly perceive and respond to stresses in the environment. As one of many pathways conserved in a long time evolution, the abscisic acid (ABA) signaling pathway has been identified as a central regulator to control gene expression and generate physiological adaptation to various stressful conditions in plant. As abscisic acid receptors, PYR/PYL/RCARs have been proved to regulate stomatal closure. Here we detected the root cell hydraulic conductivity and the aquaporin expression under treatment of exogenous ABA in wild-type and pyr1/pyl1/pyl2/pyl4 mutant Arabidopsis using cell pressure probe and qRT-PCR technology. The results showed that PYR/PYL/RCAR receptors regulate root cell hydraulic conductivity through activating aquaporin expression. Lastly, we discussed how plants maintain water balance combined with the data obtained from published articles.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (11) ◽  
pp. 637-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josef Wolfartsberger ◽  
Jan Zenisek ◽  
Christoph Sievi

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-353
Author(s):  
Martin Morris ◽  
Paddy Molloy

Abstract Through the concept defined by David Bowie as the 'grey space in the middle', a theoretical space through which the meaning and worth of a piece of art is defined, this text looks at how Martin Morris and Paddy Molloy teach and develop processes towards drawing on the Illustration Animation BA (Hons) course, part of the Design School at Kingston School of Art (KSA), Kingston University. Their pedagogic process is examined through a set of six images made by three different students (covering life drawing, copying, memory drawing and Virtual Reality [VR]) alongside the respective students' responses to their work and their experience of drawing the images. Through the mental and physical space between observer and object in which new ideas are generated and filtered through the myriad of internal and external processes involved with drawing, Morris and Molloy analyse and investigate this 'grey space' with the aim to quantify the interaction and outcomes that occur between viewer (student/tutor) and object (drawing) and furthermore consider insights gleamed from the process and questions raised. By sharing these observations this paper seeks to demonstrate that the interaction that happens in this theoretical space between viewer and object, which is the malleable mental and physical space between, can be considered as fundamental to both the development of visual communication and how we come to read works of art. This can be applied to the teaching of drawing enabling students to gain insight, ask questions, inform their understanding of draughtsmanship and discover their individual voice.


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